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This article was originally published in the journal.ie last night. How many speculators does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is none. They still think the broken one works. The business model of…

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On Wednesday 21 December 2011 Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan announced that NAMA were to make 2,000 properties available to the Government for social housing. The units, which were said to make up 20%…

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Hostile and Notorious: The Conditions of Private Property | MARK PASCHAL – Viewpoint Magazine Very good essay here on the conditions around private property and how this relates to the occupy movement, specifically the recent occupations…

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NamaWineLake has an excellent post on the relatively simple point that if the Kenny Report (first published in 1974) was implemented tomorrow the government could save the money that it expects to raise from the…

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The only enjoyable aspect of Eurostat’s decision to reclassify the Anglo-Irish Bank subsidy as a liability on the General Government Balance/Debt is to watch the Government’s hands move even faster in an increasingly vain attempt…

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On Tuesday, 30 March 2010, Brian Lenihan – Minister for Finance in a state with a €20 billion deficit and almost 450,000 people unemployed – stood before the Dáil and announced that over the next number…

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[Speech by Arthur Morgan TD, Sinn Féin’s Finance Spokesperson delivered in the Dail yesterday in response to Minister Lenihan’s announcement of the recapitalisation details following the beginning of the process to move the loans to…

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[Labour Party Finance Spokesperson Joan Burton’s speech to the Dail after Finance Minister Brian Lenihan announced the details of the recapitalisation of Irish banks after loans had been taken into NAMA] The Irish taxpayer is…

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Donagh writes: As Nat O’Connor on Progressive Economy pointed out, the NAMA Bill does not define what ‘systemically important’ means, when it states: “The Minister shall not designate an applicant credit institution as a participating…

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Dr. Garret Fitzgerald is not impressed with the notion that if the majority of legislators believe that Government proposals are wrong or misguided, they should vote against them. No, according to the good Doctor, whatever…

I’ll be writing more about this at the weekend but I think this is a good standalone clip from evidence to the banking inquiry given by Prof. Ed Kane on Wednesday 28 Jan 2015. He was asked by Deputy Pearse Doherty to elaborate on the statement below which was made in a paper that […]

Shadows never go away. Might be you don’t see them, but they’re always clinging to your heels.” A Song of Ice and Fire When I was a child in primary school my way of dealing with Irish class was to find a word in the question that matched a word in the text and hope […]

Reprieved! Reprieved! I was sure of it. When you’re most despairing The clouds may be clearing.” The Threepenny Opera. Patrick Honohan, the governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, will be before the Bank Inquiry committee this week to talk about his 2010 report into the crisis. We will be able to hear his explanation […]

I do not think it is fair to say people partied. People just lived a little better than they otherwise would have done because of the bubble.” Peter Nyberg under questioning from Deputy Pearse Doherty, 17 Dec 2014. Peter Nyberg’s appearance at the Irish bank inquiry marked the beginning of the context phase, the purpose […]